On April 11, 2001, Cloudmakers was founded as a discussion group for the interative web game centered around the film A.I. We officially solved the game on July 24, 2001. Though the original game, The Beast, has ended, Cloudmakers now serves as a clearinghouse for online gaming. Members can find out about new games, find fellow players, and reminisce about and discuss The Beast.

then

This much we were told from the beginning: Evan Chan was murdered. A web of clues was spun through the datasphere, and the Cloudmakers meticulously pored over each and every puzzle and detail. The Cloudmakers brought together diverse skills ranging from cutting edge spectral analysis to a unique and unrivaled knowledge of historical evends and world literature . . . and a whole lot more. Two heads may be better than one, but seven thousand combined to form the ultimate crime fighting syndicate. In fact, what we did was so groundbreaking that an in-game character, Jeanine Salla, honored us by "writing" a paper about us.

Microsoft was behind the curtain for the Beast; Elan Lee and Sean Stewart were the lead designers. The game was a promotion for A.I. The film was Stanley Kubrick's unfinished project, and was directed by Steven Spielberg for DreamWorks. WarnerBros released the film in the US on June 29, 2001.

now

Some Cloudmakers are playing other web games, and others are waiting for the next project from The Beast's development team. A new game is not actively being solved under the CM brand, yet Cloudmakers remains the place to find out about new developments in the world of web games and to rehash or relive The Beast.

Our mailing lists come in three flavors of noise:

October 31, 2002: The Cloudmakers Yahoo! Group has now changed its membership from "open"
(anyone can join) to "moderated".

Moderated membership means that the moderators approve any requests for
membership to the Cloudmakers Yahoo! Group.

Over the last few months, the number of new members has slowed down to a
trickle and we believe that changing to moderated membership will reduce the
amount of spam that the group has been receiving.

This is the high traffic version of Cloudmakers, and is the only version to which everyone can post. This list contains the most-up-to-date info, but is considerably higher noise than either of the other two lists.

This is the medium traffic version of Cloudmakers. Here, you'll only hear
about the stuff that the moderators thought was good enough to read. We
won't guarantee that anything in here will be good, but we promise to try
to make sure that as little redundancy sneaks in as possible. We
take posts from Cloudmakers and bounce them in here.

This is the extremely-low traffic version of Cloudmakers. Official announcements related to A.I. and future games from the Puppet Masters of The Beast will be posted here, but not much other than that.